Zarias choked him off. "No! Drummond and I go again, and we will kill the Thing this time or not come out!"

I am eternally grateful to him for that. For until then, I had felt I dared not face It again. And after that, I knew I had to.

The hours went by. Our Earth-time schedule was forgotten. We had, to spur us on, Marie's report from the telltales that It must be growing steadily, since the canyons were working ceaselessly to build bigger the transuranic elements that were Its body.

The armor was finished, crude, massive and gleaming. Zarias told Varez and me his plan.

"We will all three try to do the same thing—switch that tray of Element One-forty-four back to its chamber, and blow the chamber. One-forty-four is the brain-center, the life-center, of It. It's the one vulnerable spot."

Marie interrupted with a cry that had so much horror in it that we swung sharply around to where she stood at the telltales. She pointed at the gauges.

"Look! Radiation is filtering into the Dome now!"

We looked. It was true. The new radiation, the radiation that was Its nerve-force and will, was showing on the gauges. And at the same moment we felt, faintly, the strange tingle of that radiation through our bodies.

"If It's filtering through even the Dome's walls," Carew faltered, "then It's so strong now—"

"So strong that our foot-thick beryllium armor is no more good than paper!" I finished hoarsely.

We knew what had happened. Hours before, the armor would have been effective. But in those hours, as we had worked, It had been growing bigger and stronger. Now It was too strong for armor of any kind. Soon It would be too strong even for the massive walls of the Dome.

"We're sunk," said Carew, and sat down heavily and put his face in his hands.

Cubbison's thin shoulders sagged a little. "I fear the situation is bad. Before the rockets can get here to take us off, It will control everyone in the Dome. And when that happens—"

When that happened, when we were all mindless puppets who couldn't answer the televisor, those rockets would carry out Cubbison's orders and obliterate us and the Station together.

"I 

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